Howard Zinn, an American historian and professor emeritus in the Political Science Department at Boston University died at the ages of 87 on January 27, 2010. He died of a heart attack while traveling in Santa Monica, California.
He participated in one of the first military uses of napalm in April 1945. He played an active role in the civil rights and civil liberties movements on campus in the 1950s. In 1956, he participated in the Civil Rights movement at Spelman College. He served as an adviser to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). "VietNam: The Logic of Withdrawal" - one of his earliest books called for the U.S withdrawal from Vietnam. In January 1986, he paid a diplomatic visit to Hanoi with Rev. Daniel Berrigan during the Tet Offensive. The event was widely reported via news media and discussed in a variety of books. He became the focus of the documentary "Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train," and an outstanding figure in "The Corporation" which looks at how corporations took an amendment devised to shield former slaves and turned the documentary into a law so that multinational conglomerates could exploit the earth and its resources.
He wrote more than 20 books including the landmark 1980 "A People's History of the United States" whose implication was that real history itself was not only from the point of view of winners and conquerors. Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater made a presentation of his "The People Speak" in Provincetown 2007. He opposed to Iraq's existing occupation and war in general in his essays, lectures, and letters to newspapers. He made a comparison between the demand by a growing number of current U.S military families to stop war in Iraq and the parallel "in the Confederacy in the Civil War when soldiers' deaths resulted in their wives' rebellion and plantation owner's profit from cotton sales were increasing". He argued that no flag could cover the shame of killing innocent people.
